Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Station Six ~ Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus

SOME PEOPLE SAY she never existed because Veronica and her kind deed of wiping the sweaty, bloodied face of Jesus are not recorded in the Gospels. Oh, we needn't waste time fussing and arguing about these things, we need only to let the story change us.

In this brave and brief moment, there is the tender story of a holy saint! Dorothy Day, who began the work of the The Catholic Worker with Peter Maurin wrote:

"We are all called to be saints, Saint Paul says, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us. In as much as we are growing, putting off the old man and putting on Christ, there is some of the saint, the holy, the divine right there."

1 comment:

Women customarily comforted the dying and buried the dead in Jesus' time and the gospel accounts of the passion recognize them fulfilling these roles. Indeed, Veronica admirably fulfills the gospel portrait-- a woman who reaches out to someone who is suffering and finds God's face.

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Father Stephen was ordained a priest in 1979 for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, Long Island, New York.
Before seminary he taught in New York City parochial schools. Following ordination he served as a parish priest and assumed chaplaincies to monastic sisters, a university hospital and a school-community for young people who had lost their life-direction. He currently resides at Christ of the Hills Retreat House in Pennsylvania. He has written and self-published "There is no problem..." a book of rosary meditations and The Way of the Cross, My Way of Life, a six week series of meditations on the traditional Stations of the Cross.